Good mornig!
In the last Open Repositories Conference which was held last week in
Madrid (http://or2010.fecyt.es/publico/Home/index.aspx ) was presented
in the poster session the project called MELIBEA.
MELIBEA (http://www.accesoabierto.net/politicas/) is a directory and a
validator of institutional open-access (OA) policies regarding
scientific and academic work. As a directory, it describes the existing
policies. As a validator, it subjects them to qualitative and
quantitative analysis based on fulfilment of a set of indicators (
http://www.accesoabierto.net/politicas/politicas_estructura.php) that
reflect the bases of an institutional policy.
Based on the values assigned to a set of indicators, weighted according
to their importance, the validator indicates a score and a percentage of
fulfilment for each policy analyzed. The sum of weighted values of each
indicator is converted to a percentage scale to give what we have called
the "validated open-access percentage" (see how i t is calculated:
http://www.accesoabierto.net/politicas/default.php?contenido=acerca ).
The types of institution analyzed include universities, research
centres, funding agencies and governmental organizations.
MELIBEA has three main objectives:
* 1. To establish indicators that reveal the strong and weak points
of institutional OA polices.
* 2. To propose a methodology to guide institutions when they are
drawing up an institutional OA policy.
* 3. To offer a tool for comparing the contents of policies between
institutions.
The aim is not to be a ranking, but to offer a tool where to aanlyse and
visualize the weaknesses or strenghts of an institutional OA policy
based on its wording. It seems something trivial but accomplishment of
a policy is based on its terms.
Please if you detect any mistake or you would like to make a comment,
contact me. I will be pleased if you could check your policy, if any, to
analyse our approach.
Best wishes
Reme
R. Melero
IATA, CSIC
Avda Agustín Escardino 7, 46980 Paterna (Valencia), Spain
TEl +34 96 390 00 22. Fax 96 363 63 01
E-mail rmelero AT iata.csic.es
http://www.accesoabierto.net

Reme, Thank you for bringing this new service to our attention. OA policies ↵
are vitally important to the development of institutional repositories, and ↵
services that can highlight and bring attention to this development can be ↵
valuable.
There are a few aspects of the validation aspects of the new MELIBEA service ↵
that confuse, and possibly trouble, me. The first is the main indicator, ↵
%OAval, which is the most visible result for a policy. What do you expect this ↵
will tell people about a given policy? I randomly selected a couple of ↵
policies, one of which was for my own school, to find they each scored about ↵
50%. I would expect these to be among the leaders in terms of OA policies, so ↵
this seems a surprisingly unhelpful score.
So what's the explanation? Note that the objects being evaluated are ↵
institutional OA policies; they are effectively being presented in relation to ↵
institutional repositories when the policy specifies where to archive is an IR ↵
with a URL. It seems that the scores include ratings for OA publication policy, ↵
libre vs gratis OA, publisher pdf, sanctions (score if Yes), incentives (score ↵
if Yes), etc., some of which an institution might specify but which might not ↵
apply to an IR http://www.accesoabierto.net/politicas/politicas_estructura.php.↵
However you weight these factors they are still contributors to the overall ↵
score, so a policy that is specific to an IR is immediately handicapped, or ↵
appears to be unless there is more context to understand the scores.
Which leads me to another question on the visualisation of the validator, and ↵
its use of green, gold (and red) in the meter. Do the green and gold refer the ↵
the classic OA colours? This would be quite convenient, since it would appear ↵
that the green repository policies I mentioned above are achieving almost full ↵
scores in the green zone of the meter. However, I suspect this cannot be the ↵
case, because it would assume that institutions must have a green AND gold ↵
policy, but not simply gold (whatever argument could be put for that).
It is important that new services should help reveal and promote OA policies, ↵
as you seek to do, but at the same time not to prejudice the development of ↵
such policies by mixing and not fairly separating the contributing factors, ↵
especially where these relate to different types of OA.
Steve Hitchcock
IAM Group, Building 32
School of Electronics and Computer Science
University of Southampton, SO17 1BJ, UK
Email: sh94r AT ecs.soton.ac.uk
Twitter: http://twitter.com/stevehit
Connotea: http://www.connotea.org/user/stevehit
Tel: +44 (0)23 8059 7698 Fax: +44 (0)23 8059 2865
On 15 Jul 2010, at 08:14, Remedios Melero wrote:
> Good mornig!
> In the last Open Repositories Conference which was held last week in ↵
Madrid (http://or2010.fecyt.es/publico/Home/index.aspx ) was presented in the ↵
poster session the project called MELIBEA.
> MELIBEA (http://www.accesoabierto.net/politicas/) is a directory and a ↵
validator of institutional open-access (OA) policies regarding scientific and ↵
academic work. As a directory, it describes the existing policies. As a ↵
validator, it subjects them to qualitative and quantitative analysis based on ↵
fulfilment of a set of indicators ( ↵http://www.accesoabierto.net/politicas/politicas_estructura.php) that reflect ↵
the bases of an institutional policy.
>
> Based on the values assigned to a set of indicators, weighted according to ↵
their importance, the validator indicates a score and a percentage of ↵
fulfilment for each policy analyzed. The sum of weighted values of each ↵
indicator is converted to a percentage scale to give what we have called the ↵
“validated open-access percentage” (see how i t is calculated: ↵http://www.accesoabierto.net/politicas/default.php?contenido=acerca ).
>
> The types of institution analyzed include universities, research centres, ↵
funding agencies and governmental organizations.
>
> MELIBEA has three main objectives:
>
> • 1. To establish indicators that reveal the strong and weak points of ↵
institutional OA polices.
> • 2. To propose a methodology to guide institutions when they are drawing ↵
up an institutional OA policy.
> • 3. To offer a tool for comparing the contents of policies between ↵
institutions.
> The aim is not to be a ranking, but to offer a tool where to aanlyse and ↵
visualize the weaknesses or strenghts of an institutional OA policy based on ↵
its wording. It seems something trivial but accomplishment of a policy is ↵
based on its terms.
> Please if you detect any mistake or you would like to make a comment, ↵
contact me. I will be pleased if you could check your policy, if any, to ↵
analyse our approach.
> Best wishes
> Reme
>
>
> R. Melero
> IATA, CSIC
> Avda Agustín Escardino 7, 46980 Paterna (Valencia), Spain
> TEl +34 96 390 00 22. Fax 96 363 63 01
> E-mail rmelero AT iata.csic.es
> http://www.accesoabierto.net
>
> --
> To unsubscribe from the BOAI Forum, use the form on this page:
> http://www.soros.org/openaccess/forum.shtml?f
Steve Hitchcock
IAM Group, Building 32
School of Electronics and Computer Science
University of Southampton, SO17 1BJ, UK
Email: sh94r AT ecs.soton.ac.uk
Twitter: http://twitter.com/stevehit
Connotea: http://www.connotea.org/user/stevehit
Tel: +44 (0)23 8059 7698 Fax: +44 (0)23 8059 2865
--
To unsubscribe from the BOAI Forum, use the form on this page:
http://www.soros.org/openaccess/forum.shtml?f

Thanks Steve for your comments,
I will be very briefly now because I have to leave, however if you read
how the weight have been calculated, and the variables within the model,
you will realise that this approach has been prepared for any kind of
instituttion, funder or univ... that means some questions are valid not
for any of them and that has been taken into account in the formula to
calculate the percentage.
About colors, we could modify them, but that is not the issue, I will
make clear any other question early tomorrow. In any case the aim of
MELIBEA is to foster OA policies not to confuse people, therefore any
suggestion to improve it will be considered, analysed and applied .
Reme
El 15/07/2010 11:22, Steve Hitchcock escribió:
> Reme, Thank you for bringing this new service to our attention. OA ↵
policies are vitally important to the development of institutional ↵
repositories, and services that can highlight and bring attention to this ↵
development can be valuable.
>
> There are a few aspects of the validation aspects of the new MELIBEA ↵
service that confuse, and possibly trouble, me. The first is the main ↵
indicator, %OAval, which is the most visible result for a policy. What do you ↵
expect this will tell people about a given policy? I randomly selected a couple ↵
of policies, one of which was for my own school, to find they each scored about ↵
50%. I would expect these to be among the leaders in terms of OA policies, so ↵
this seems a surprisingly unhelpful score.
>
> So what's the explanation? Note that the objects being evaluated are ↵
institutional OA policies; they are effectively being presented in relation to ↵
institutional repositories when the policy specifies where to archive is an IR ↵
with a URL. It seems that the scores include ratings for OA publication policy, ↵
libre vs gratis OA, publisher pdf, sanctions (score if Yes), incentives (score ↵
if Yes), etc., some of which an institution might specify but which might not ↵
apply to an IR http://www.accesoabierto.net/politicas/politicas_estructura.php.↵
However you weight these factors they are still contributors to the overall ↵
score, so a policy that is specific to an IR is immediately handicapped, or ↵
appears to be unless there is more context to understand the scores.
>
> Which leads me to another question on the visualisation of the validator, ↵
and its use of green, gold (and red) in the meter. Do the green and gold refer ↵
the the classic OA colours? This would be quite convenient, since it would ↵
appear that the green repository policies I mentioned above are achieving ↵
almost full scores in the green zone of the meter. However, I suspect this ↵
cannot be the case, because it would assume that institutions must have a green ↵
AND gold policy, but not simply gold (whatever argument could be put for that).
>
> It is important that new services should help reveal and promote OA ↵
policies, as you seek to do, but at the same time not to prejudice the ↵
development of such policies by mixing and not fairly separating the ↵
contributing factors, especially where these relate to different types of OA.
>
> Steve Hitchcock
> IAM Group, Building 32
> School of Electronics and Computer Science
> University of Southampton, SO17 1BJ, UK
> Email: sh94r AT ecs.soton.ac.uk
> Twitter: http://twitter.com/stevehit
> Connotea: http://www.connotea.org/user/stevehit
> Tel: +44 (0)23 8059 7698 Fax: +44 (0)23 8059 2865
>
> On 15 Jul 2010, at 08:14, Remedios Melero wrote:
>
>
>> Good mornig!
>> In the last Open Repositories Conference which was held last week in ↵
Madrid (http://or2010.fecyt.es/publico/Home/index.aspx ) was presented in the ↵
poster session the project called MELIBEA.
>> MELIBEA (http://www.accesoabierto.net/politicas/) is a directory and ↵
a validator of institutional open-access (OA) policies regarding scientific and ↵
academic work. As a directory, it describes the existing policies. As a ↵
validator, it subjects them to qualitative and quantitative analysis based on ↵
fulfilment of a set of indicators ( ↵http://www.accesoabierto.net/politicas/politicas_estructura.php) that reflect ↵
the bases of an institutional policy.
>>
>> Based on the values assigned to a set of indicators, weighted ↵
according to their importance, the validator indicates a score and a percentage ↵
of fulfilment for each policy analyzed. The sum of weighted values of each ↵
indicator is converted to a percentage scale to give what we have called the ↵
“validated open-access percentage” (see how i t is calculated: ↵http://www.accesoabierto.net/politicas/default.php?contenido=acerca ).
>>
>> The types of institution analyzed include universities, research ↵
centres, funding agencies and governmental organizations.
>>
>> MELIBEA has three main objectives:
>>
>> • 1. To establish indicators that reveal the strong and weak points ↵
of institutional OA polices.
>> • 2. To propose a methodology to guide institutions when they are ↵
drawing up an institutional OA policy.
>> • 3. To offer a tool for comparing the contents of policies between ↵
institutions.
>> The aim is not to be a ranking, but to offer a tool where to aanlyse ↵
and visualize the weaknesses or strenghts of an institutional OA policy based ↵
on its wording. It seems something trivial but accomplishment of a policy is ↵
based on its terms.
>> Please if you detect any mistake or you would like to make a comment, ↵
contact me. I will be pleased if you could check your policy, if any, to ↵
analyse our approach.
>> Best wishes
>> Reme
>>
>>
>> R. Melero
>> IATA, CSIC
>> Avda Agustín Escardino 7, 46980 Paterna (Valencia), Spain
>> TEl +34 96 390 00 22. Fax 96 363 63 01
>> E-mail rmelero AT iata.csic.es
>> http://www.accesoabierto.net
>>
>> --
>> To unsubscribe from the BOAI Forum, use the form on this page:
>> http://www.soros.org/openaccess/forum.shtml?f
>>
>
>
> Steve Hitchcock
> IAM Group, Building 32
> School of Electronics and Computer Science
> University of Southampton, SO17 1BJ, UK
> Email: sh94r AT ecs.soton.ac.uk
> Twitter: http://twitter.com/stevehit
> Connotea: http://www.connotea.org/user/stevehit
> Tel: +44 (0)23 8059 7698 Fax: +44 (0)23 8059 2865
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> --
> To unsubscribe from the BOAI Forum, use the form on this page:
> http://www.soros.org/openaccess/forum.shtml?f
>
--
To unsubscribe from the BOAI Forum, use the form on this page:
http://www.soros.org/openaccess/forum.shtml?f

Dea Steve,
I apologize for the delay in my response, but I will try to give some
explanations to make clear some issues you raised in your message (my
comments are in capital letters, to distinguish them from yours)
El 15/07/2010 11:22, Steve Hitchcock escribió:
> Reme, Thank you for bringing this new service to our attention. OA ↵
policies are vitally important to the development of institutional ↵
repositories, and services that can highlight and bring attention to this ↵
development can be valuable.
>
> There are a few aspects of the validation aspects of the new MELIBEA ↵
service that confuse, and possibly trouble, me. The first is the main ↵
indicator, %OAval, which is the most visible result for a policy. What do you ↵
expect this will tell people about a given policy? I randomly selected a couple ↵
of policies, one of which was for my own school, to find they each scored about ↵
50%. I would expect these to be among the leaders in terms of OA policies, so ↵
this seems a surprisingly unhelpful score.
>
> So what's the explanation? Note that the objects being evaluated are ↵
institutional OA policies; they are effectively being presented in relation to ↵
institutional repositories when the policy specifies where to archive is an IR ↵
with a URL. It seems that the scores include ratings for OA publication policy, ↵
libre vs gratis OA, publisher pdf, sanctions (score if Yes), incentives (score ↵
if Yes), etc., some of which an institution might specify but which might not ↵
apply to an IR http://www.accesoabierto.net/politicas/politicas_estructura.php.↵
However you weight these factors they are still contributors to the overall ↵
score, so a policy that is specific to an IR is immediately handicapped, or ↵
appears to be unless there is more context to understand the scores.
>
>
AS I WROTE BEFORE THIS IS NOT A RANKING, IT IS NOT THE AIM OF MELIBEA
BUT TO HAVE A KIND OF REFERENCE ON WHAT TOPICS, ISSUES OR MATTERS TO BE
INCLUDED IN AN OA POLICY. WE ARE TALKING ABOUT INSTITUTIONAL POLICIES OF
DIFFERENTE NATURE, NOT ABOUT REPOSITORIES POLICIES. IF THE POLICY ONLY
TALKS ABOUT THE REQUIREMENT TO DEPOSIT IN A REPOSITORY, IT SHOULD
SPECIFY WHAT, WHEN AND UNDER WHAT CONDITIONS, IF ANY. IT IS NOT THE SAME
TO SAY WHAT DOCUMENTS AND WHAT VERSIONS AND WHEN THAN SIMPLY SAY " ↵
ANY"
OR "AS SOON AS POSSIBLE" (this could be a month after publication or
years after publication, depending on one's criteria). GOLD ROUTE, NEVER
IS REQUIRED ACCORDING OUR APPROACH ("Gold (Recommended in OA ↵
journals")
AND NOT ALL OA JOURNALS ARE SUPPORTED BY SAME ECONOMIC MODEL.
> Which leads me to another question on the visualisation of the validator, ↵
and its use of green, gold (and red) in the meter. Do the green and gold refer ↵
the the classic OA colours? This would be quite convenient, since it would ↵
appear that the green repository policies I mentioned above are achieving ↵
almost full scores in the green zone of the meter. However, I suspect this ↵
cannot be the case, because it would assume that institutions must have a green ↵
AND gold policy, but not simply gold (whatever argument could be put for that).
>
COLORS DO NOT MEAN THAT, WE WANTED JUST TO DISTINGUISH ZONES LIKE IT
WERE A SPECTRA.
> It is important that new services should help reveal and promote OA ↵
policies, as you seek to do, but at the same time not to prejudice the ↵
development of such policies by mixing and not fairly separating the ↵
contributing factors, especially where these relate to different types of OA.
>
I DO NOT THINK WE ARE MIXING, IN FACT THERE TWO MODELS, ONE FOR UNIV.
AND RESEARCH CNETRES AND ANOTHER FOR FUNDERS AND GOV. INSTITUTIONS AND
THE QUESTIONS FOR THEM ARE DIFFERENT, for instance, FOR A FUNDER THE
QUESTION ABOUT DEPOSIT O THESIS IS NOT APPLICABLE.
IN SUMMARY, OUR MODEL COULD NOT BE "PERFECT" BUT I IS ONE, WHICH ↵
COULD
DETECT DIFFERENCES BETWEEN REQUEST AND REQUIRE, WHO, WHAT , WHEN IF
THERE ARE ANY INCENTIVES OR SANCTIONS ( this has not to be a negative
point but to remember we should assume reponsible attitudes).
However we will revise the model to see if we can make any improvement
to make it clear, we are working also in a graph interface to show some
data in graphical form.
Best wishes
Reme
>
>> R. Melero
>> IATA, CSIC
>> Avda Agustín Escardino 7, 46980 Paterna (Valencia), Spain
>> TEl +34 96 390 00 22. Fax 96 363 63 01
>> E-mail rmelero AT iata.csic.es
>> http://www.accesoabierto.net
>>
>> --
>>

Dear Reme, if I may also make an intervention in your exchange with Steve ↵
Hitchcock about the MELIBEA OA policy evaluator:
http://www.accesoabierto.net/politicas/
The MELIBEA service is extremely timely and promising, and could be potentially ↵
useful and even influential in shaping OA mandates -- but that makes it all the ↵
more important to get it right, rather than releasing MELIBEA prematurely, when ↵
it still risks increasing confusion rather than providing clarity and ↵
direction.
You are right to point out that -- unlike the CSIC's University Ranking and the ↵
Repository Ranking -- the policy evaluator is not really a ranking. But you ↵
have set up the composite algorithm and the graphics to make it a ranking just ↵
the same.
You are also point out, correctly, that the policy criteria for institutions ↵
and funders are not (and should not be) the same. Yet, with the MELIBEA coding ↵
as well as the algorithm, they are treated the same way.
You also point out, rightly, that gold OA publishing policy is not central to ↵
institutional OA policy making, yet there it is, as part of the MELIBEA ↵
algorithm.
You also point out that the color code has nothing to do with the ↵
"green" OA coding -- yet there it is, competing with the widespread ↵
use of green to designate self-archiving, and thereby causing confusion, both ↵
overt and covert.
I would be more than happy to give you feedback on every aspect of MELIBEA -- ↵
it could be a useful and natural complement to the ROARMAP registry of OA ↵
policies.
But as it is designed now, I can only agree with Steve Hitchcock's points and ↵
conclude that consulting MELIBEA today would be likely to induce confusion and ↵
would not help in bringing the all-important focus and direction to OA ↵
policy-making that I am sure CSIC, too, seeks, and seeks to help bring about.
Here are just a few prima facie points:
(1) Since MELIBEA is not, and should not be construed as a ranking of OA ↵
policies -- especially because it includes both institutional and funder ↵
policies -- it is important NOT to plug it into an algorithm until and unless ↵
the algorithm has first been carefully tested, with consultation, to make sure ↵
it weights policy criteria in a way that optimizes OA progress and guides ↵
policy-makers in the right direction.
(2) For this reason, it is more important to allow users to generate separate ↵
flat lists of institutions or funders on the various policy criteria, ↵
considered and compared independently, rather than on the basis of a ↵
prematurely and arbitrarily weighted joint algorithm.
(3) This is all the more important since the data are based on less then 200 ↵
institutions, whereas the CSIC University Rankings are based on thousands. ↵
Since the population is still so small, MELIBEA risks having a disproportionate ↵
effect on initial conditions and hence direction-setting; all the more reason ↵
NOT to amplify noise and indirection by assigning untested initial weights ↵
without carefully thinking through and weighing the consequences.
(4) A potential internal cross-validator of some of the criteria would be a ↵
reliable measure of outcome -- but that requires much more attention to ↵
estimating the annual size and growth-rate of each repository (in terms of OA's ↵
target contents, which are full-text articles), normalized for institution size ↵
and annual total target output. Policy criteria (such as request/require or ↵
immediate/delayed) should be cross-validated against these outcome measures ↵
(such as percentage and growth rate of annual target output).
(5) The MELIBEA color coding needs to be revised, and revised quickly, if there ↵
is to be an algorithm at all. All those arbitrary colors in the display of ↵
single repositories as ranked by the algorithm are both unnecessary and ↵
confusing. The objective should be to order and focus clearly and intuitively. ↵
Whatever is correlated with more green OA output (such as a higher level or ↵
faster growth rate in OA's target content) should be coded as darker or bigger ↵
shades of green. The same should be true for the policy criteria, separately ↵
and jointly: in each case, request/require, delayed/immediate, etc., the ↵
greenward polarity is obvious and intuitive. This should be reflected in the ↵
graphics as well as in any comparative rankings.
(6) If you include repositories with no OA policy at all (i.e., just a ↵
repository and an open invitation to deposit) then all you are doing is ↵
duplicating ROAR and ROARMAP, whereas the purpose, presumably, of MELIBEA, is ↵
to highlight, weigh and compare specific policy differences among (the very ↵
few) repositories that DO have policies.
(7) The sign-up data -- ↵http://www.accesoabierto.net/politicas/nueva.php?directorio=politicas -- are ↵
also rather confusing; the criteria are not always consistent, relevant or ↵
applicable. The sign-up seems to be designed to make a funder mandate the ↵
generic option, whereas this is quite the opposite of reality. There are far ↵
more institutions and institutional repositories and policies than funders. ↵
There should be separate criterial lists for institutional policies and for ↵
funder policies; they are not the same. There is also far too much focus on ↵
gold OA policy and payment. If included at all, this should only be at the end, ↵
as an addendum, not the focus at the beginning, and on a par with green OA ↵
policy.
(8) There is also potential confusion on the matter of "waivers": ↵
There are two aspects of a mandate. One concerns whether or not deposit is ↵
required (and if so, whether that requirement can be waived) and the other ↵
concerns whether or not rights-reservation is required (and if so, whether that ↵
requirement can be waived). These two distinct and independent ↵
requirements/waivers are completely conflated in the current version of ↵
MELIBEA.
I hope there will be substantive consultation and conscientious redesign of ↵
these and other aspects of MELIBEA before it is can recommended for serious ↵
consideration and use.
Stevan Harnad
On 2010-07-19, at 5:18 AM, Remedios Melero wrote:
> Dear Steve,
>
> I apologize for the delay in my response, but I will try to give some ↵
explanations to make clear some issues you raised in your message (my comments ↵
are in capital letters, to distinguish them from yours)
>
>
>
> El 15/07/2010 11:22, Steve Hitchcock escribió:
>> Reme, Thank you for bringing this new service to our attention. OA ↵
policies are vitally important to the development of institutional ↵
repositories, and services that can highlight and bring attention to this ↵
development can be valuable.
>>
>> There are a few aspects of the validation aspects of the new MELIBEA ↵
service that confuse, and possibly trouble, me. The first is the main ↵
indicator, %OAval, which is the most visible result for a policy. What do you ↵
expect this will tell people about a given policy? I randomly selected a couple ↵
of policies, one of which was for my own school, to find they each scored about ↵
50%. I would expect these to be among the leaders in terms of OA policies, so ↵
this seems a surprisingly unhelpful score.
>>
>> So what's the explanation? Note that the objects being evaluated are ↵
institutional OA policies; they are effectively being presented in relation to ↵
institutional repositories when the policy specifies where to archive is an IR ↵
with a URL. It seems that the scores include ratings for OA publication policy, ↵
libre vs gratis OA, publisher pdf, sanctions (score if Yes), incentives (score ↵
if Yes), etc., some of which an institution might specify but which might not ↵
apply to an IR
>> http://www.accesoabierto.net/politicas/politicas_estructura.php
>> . However you weight these factors they are still contributors to the ↵
overall score, so a policy that is specific to an IR is immediately ↵
handicapped, or appears to be unless there is more context to understand the ↵
scores.
>>
>>
>>
> AS I WROTE BEFORE THIS IS NOT A RANKING, IT IS NOT THE AIM OF MELIBEA BUT ↵
TO HAVE A KIND OF REFERENCE ON WHAT TOPICS, ISSUES OR MATTERS TO BE INCLUDED IN ↵
AN OA POLICY. WE ARE TALKING ABOUT INSTITUTIONAL POLICIES OF DIFFERENTE NATURE, ↵
NOT ABOUT REPOSITORIES POLICIES. IF THE POLICY ONLY TALKS ABOUT THE REQUIREMENT ↵
TO DEPOSIT IN A REPOSITORY, IT SHOULD SPECIFY WHAT, WHEN AND UNDER WHAT ↵
CONDITIONS, IF ANY. IT IS NOT THE SAME TO SAY WHAT DOCUMENTS AND WHAT VERSIONS ↵
AND WHEN THAN SIMPLY SAY " ANY" OR "AS SOON AS POSSIBLE" ↵
(this could be a month after publication or years after publication, depending ↵
on one's criteria). GOLD ROUTE, NEVER IS REQUIRED ACCORDING OUR APPROACH ↵
("Gold (Recommended in OA journals") AND NOT ALL OA JOURNALS ARE ↵
SUPPORTED BY SAME ECONOMIC MODEL.
>
>
>> Which leads me to another question on the visualisation of the ↵
validator, and its use of green, gold (and red) in the meter. Do the green and ↵
gold refer the the classic OA colours? This would be quite convenient, since it ↵
would appear that the green repository policies I mentioned above are achieving ↵
almost full scores in the green zone of the meter. However, I suspect this ↵
cannot be the case, because it would assume that institutions must have a green ↵
AND gold policy, but not simply gold (whatever argument could be put for that). ↵
>>
>>
> COLORS DO NOT MEAN THAT, WE WANTED JUST TO DISTINGUISH ZONES LIKE IT WERE ↵
A SPECTRA.
>
>> It is important that new services should help reveal and promote OA ↵
policies, as you seek to do, but at the same time not to prejudice the ↵
development of such policies by mixing and not fairly separating the ↵
contributing factors, especially where these relate to different types of OA.
>>
>>
> I DO NOT THINK WE ARE MIXING, IN FACT THERE TWO MODELS, ONE FOR UNIV. AND ↵
RESEARCH CNETRES AND ANOTHER FOR FUNDERS AND GOV. INSTITUTIONS AND THE ↵
QUESTIONS FOR THEM ARE DIFFERENT, for instance, FOR A FUNDER THE QUESTION ABOUT ↵
DEPOSIT O THESIS IS NOT APPLICABLE.
> IN SUMMARY, OUR MODEL COULD NOT BE "PERFECT" BUT I IS ONE, WHICH ↵
COULD DETECT DIFFERENCES BETWEEN REQUEST AND REQUIRE, WHO, WHAT , WHEN IF THERE ↵
ARE ANY INCENTIVES OR SANCTIONS ( this has not to be a negative point but to ↵
remember we should assume reponsible attitudes).
>
> However we will revise the model to see if we can make any improvement to ↵
make it clear, we are working also in a graph interface to show some data in ↵
graphical form.
> Best wishes
> Reme
>
>>
>>> R. Melero
>>> IATA, CSIC
>>> Avda Agustín Escardino 7, 46980 Paterna (Valencia), Spain
>>> TEl +34 96 390 00 22. Fax 96 363 63 01
>>> E-mail
>>> rmelero AT iata.csic.es
>>>
>>>
>>> http://www.accesoabierto.net
>>>
>>>
>>> --
>>>
>>>
>
>
> --
> To unsubscribe from the BOAI Forum, use the form on this page:
> http://www.soros.org/openaccess/forum.shtml?f
--
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http://www.soros.org/openaccess/forum.shtml?f

Good morning!
Thanks Stevan for your comments, in fact I did not expect so much
controversial discussion, but I prefer this since it serves to think
about some aspects that one has not considered or has misssed. I will
revise your comments and see how we can implement some improvements to
avoid any missunderstanding. However, something I would like to make
clear is:
1. The CSIC ranking of repositories and universities is nothing to
compare, that is a ranking build on "visibility" of an institution ↵
in
the web. A graphic representation has not to mean necesarily a ranking
but a measurement
2. MELIBEA is not a directory of repositories, but OA policies, there
ara a lot of repositories but few OA policies, obviously most of the
policies are associated with the deposit in an insituttional or subject
repository.
3. The model is based on the weights of some variables, you are right,
they could be different because it will be always an approach, however
they have been tested, changed and modified before MELIBEA was publicly
announced.
I will take the advantage of summer holidays to think about all these
issues and hopefully after them I can show some changes aimed to improve
the tool. I wil start with the colors which I see were more important
than thought!
Reme
El 19/07/2010 15:56, Stevan Harnad escribió:
> Dear Reme, if I may also make an intervention in your exchange with Steve ↵
Hitchcock about the MELIBEA OA policy evaluator:
> http://www.accesoabierto.net/politicas/
>
> The MELIBEA service is extremely timely and promising, and could be ↵
potentially useful and even influential in shaping OA mandates -- but that ↵
makes it all the more important to get it right, rather than releasing MELIBEA ↵
prematurely, when it still risks increasing confusion rather than providing ↵
clarity and direction.
>
> You are right to point out that -- unlike the CSIC's University Ranking ↵
and the Repository Ranking -- the policy evaluator is not really a ranking. But ↵
you have set up the composite algorithm and the graphics to make it a ranking ↵
just the same.
>
> You are also point out, correctly, that the policy criteria for ↵
institutions and funders are not (and should not be) the same. Yet, with the ↵
MELIBEA coding as well as the algorithm, they are treated the same way.
>
> You also point out, rightly, that gold OA publishing policy is not central ↵
to institutional OA policy making, yet there it is, as part of the MELIBEA ↵
algorithm.
>
> You also point out that the color code has nothing to do with the ↵
"green" OA coding -- yet there it is, competing with the widespread ↵
use of green to designate self-archiving, and thereby causing confusion, both ↵
overt and covert.
>
> I would be more than happy to give you feedback on every aspect of MELIBEA ↵
-- it could be a useful and natural complement to the ROARMAP registry of OA ↵
policies.
>
> But as it is designed now, I can only agree with Steve Hitchcock's points ↵
and conclude that consulting MELIBEA today would be likely to induce confusion ↵
and would not help in bringing the all-important focus and direction to OA ↵
policy-making that I am sure CSIC, too, seeks, and seeks to help bring about.
>
> Here are just a few prima facie points:
>
> (1) Since MELIBEA is not, and should not be construed as a ranking of OA ↵
policies -- especially because it includes both institutional and funder ↵
policies -- it is important NOT to plug it into an algorithm until and unless ↵
the algorithm has first been carefully tested, with consultation, to make sure ↵
it weights policy criteria in a way that optimizes OA progress and guides ↵
policy-makers in the right direction.
>
> (2) For this reason, it is more important to allow users to generate ↵
separate flat lists of institutions or funders on the various policy criteria, ↵
considered and compared independently, rather than on the basis of a ↵
prematurely and arbitrarily weighted joint algorithm.
>
> (3) This is all the more important since the data are based on less then ↵
200 institutions, whereas the CSIC University Rankings are based on thousands. ↵
Since the population is still so small, MELIBEA risks having a disproportionate ↵
effect on initial conditions and hence direction-setting; all the more reason ↵
NOT to amplify noise and indirection by assigning untested initial weights ↵
without carefully thinking through and weighing the consequences.
>
> (4) A potential internal cross-validator of some of the criteria would be ↵
a reliable measure of outcome -- but that requires much more attention to ↵
estimating the annual size and growth-rate of each repository (in terms of OA's ↵
target contents, which are full-text articles), normalized for institution size ↵
and annual total target output. Policy criteria (such as request/require or ↵
immediate/delayed) should be cross-validated against these outcome measures ↵
(such as percentage and growth rate of annual target output).
>
> (5) The MELIBEA color coding needs to be revised, and revised quickly, if ↵
there is to be an algorithm at all. All those arbitrary colors in the display ↵
of single repositories as ranked by the algorithm are both unnecessary and ↵
confusing. The objective should be to order and focus clearly and intuitively. ↵
Whatever is correlated with more green OA output (such as a higher level or ↵
faster growth rate in OA's target content) should be coded as darker or bigger ↵
shades of green. The same should be true for the policy criteria, separately ↵
and jointly: in each case, request/require, delayed/immediate, etc., the ↵
greenward polarity is obvious and intuitive. This should be reflected in the ↵
graphics as well as in any comparative rankings.
>
> (6) If you include repositories with no OA policy at all (i.e., just a ↵
repository and an open invitation to deposit) then all you are doing is ↵
duplicating ROAR and ROARMAP, whereas the purpose, presumably, of MELIBEA, is ↵
to highlight, weigh and compare specific policy differences among (the very ↵
few) repositories that DO have policies.
>
> (7) The sign-up data -- ↵http://www.accesoabierto.net/politicas/nueva.php?directorio=politicas -- are ↵
also rather confusing; the criteria are not always consistent, relevant or ↵
applicable. The sign-up seems to be designed to make a funder mandate the ↵
generic option, whereas this is quite the opposite of reality. There are far ↵
more institutions and institutional repositories and policies than funders. ↵
There should be separate criterial lists for institutional policies and for ↵
funder policies; they are not the same. There is also far too much focus on ↵
gold OA policy and payment. If included at all, this should only be at the end, ↵
as an addendum, not the focus at the beginning, and on a par with green OA ↵
policy.
>
> (8) There is also potential confusion on the matter of ↵
"waivers": There are two aspects of a mandate. One concerns whether ↵
or not deposit is required (and if so, whether that requirement can be waived) ↵
and the other concerns whether or not rights-reservation is required (and if ↵
so, whether that requirement can be waived). These two distinct and independent ↵
requirements/waivers are completely conflated in the current version of ↵
MELIBEA.
>
> I hope there will be substantive consultation and conscientious redesign ↵
of these and other aspects of MELIBEA before it is can recommended for serious ↵
consideration and use.
>
> Stevan Harnad
>
>
> On 2010-07-19, at 5:18 AM, Remedios Melero wrote:
>
>
>> Dear Steve,
>>
>> I apologize for the delay in my response, but I will try to give some ↵
explanations to make clear some issues you raised in your message (my comments ↵
are in capital letters, to distinguish them from yours)
>>
>>
>>
>> El 15/07/2010 11:22, Steve Hitchcock escribió:
>>
>>> Reme, Thank you for bringing this new service to our attention. ↵
OA policies are vitally important to the development of institutional ↵
repositories, and services that can highlight and bring attention to this ↵
development can be valuable.
>>>
>>> There are a few aspects of the validation aspects of the new ↵
MELIBEA service that confuse, and possibly trouble, me. The first is the main ↵
indicator, %OAval, which is the most visible result for a policy. What do you ↵
expect this will tell people about a given policy? I randomly selected a couple ↵
of policies, one of which was for my own school, to find they each scored about ↵
50%. I would expect these to be among the leaders in terms of OA policies, so ↵
this seems a surprisingly unhelpful score.
>>>
>>> So what's the explanation? Note that the objects being evaluated ↵
are institutional OA policies; they are effectively being presented in relation ↵
to institutional repositories when the policy specifies where to archive is an ↵
IR with a URL. It seems that the scores include ratings for OA publication ↵
policy, libre vs gratis OA, publisher pdf, sanctions (score if Yes), incentives ↵
(score if Yes), etc., some of which an institution might specify but which ↵
might not apply to an IR
>>> http://www.accesoabierto.net/politicas/politicas_estructura.php
>>> . However you weight these factors they are still contributors to ↵
the overall score, so a policy that is specific to an IR is immediately ↵
handicapped, or appears to be unless there is more context to understand the ↵
scores.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>> AS I WROTE BEFORE THIS IS NOT A RANKING, IT IS NOT THE AIM OF MELIBEA ↵
BUT TO HAVE A KIND OF REFERENCE ON WHAT TOPICS, ISSUES OR MATTERS TO BE ↵
INCLUDED IN AN OA POLICY. WE ARE TALKING ABOUT INSTITUTIONAL POLICIES OF ↵
DIFFERENTE NATURE, NOT ABOUT REPOSITORIES POLICIES. IF THE POLICY ONLY TALKS ↵
ABOUT THE REQUIREMENT TO DEPOSIT IN A REPOSITORY, IT SHOULD SPECIFY WHAT, WHEN ↵
AND UNDER WHAT CONDITIONS, IF ANY. IT IS NOT THE SAME TO SAY WHAT DOCUMENTS ↵
AND WHAT VERSIONS AND WHEN THAN SIMPLY SAY " ANY" OR "AS SOON AS ↵
POSSIBLE" (this could be a month after publication or years after ↵
publication, depending on one's criteria). GOLD ROUTE, NEVER IS REQUIRED ↵
ACCORDING OUR APPROACH ("Gold (Recommended in OA journals") AND NOT ↵
ALL OA JOURNALS ARE SUPPORTED BY SAME ECONOMIC MODEL.
>>
>>
>>
>>> Which leads me to another question on the visualisation of the ↵
validator, and its use of green, gold (and red) in the meter. Do the green and ↵
gold refer the the classic OA colours? This would be quite convenient, since it ↵
would appear that the green repository policies I mentioned above are achieving ↵
almost full scores in the green zone of the meter. However, I suspect this ↵
cannot be the case, because it would assume that institutions must have a green ↵
AND gold policy, but not simply gold (whatever argument could be put for that).
>>>
>>>
>>>
>> COLORS DO NOT MEAN THAT, WE WANTED JUST TO DISTINGUISH ZONES LIKE IT ↵
WERE A SPECTRA.
>>
>>
>>> It is important that new services should help reveal and promote ↵
OA policies, as you seek to do, but at the same time not to prejudice the ↵
development of such policies by mixing and not fairly separating the ↵
contributing factors, especially where these relate to different types of OA.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>> I DO NOT THINK WE ARE MIXING, IN FACT THERE TWO MODELS, ONE FOR UNIV. ↵
AND RESEARCH CNETRES AND ANOTHER FOR FUNDERS AND GOV. INSTITUTIONS AND THE ↵
QUESTIONS FOR THEM ARE DIFFERENT, for instance, FOR A FUNDER THE QUESTION ABOUT ↵
DEPOSIT O THESIS IS NOT APPLICABLE.
>> IN SUMMARY, OUR MODEL COULD NOT BE "PERFECT" BUT I IS ONE, ↵
WHICH COULD DETECT DIFFERENCES BETWEEN REQUEST AND REQUIRE, WHO, WHAT , WHEN IF ↵
THERE ARE ANY INCENTIVES OR SANCTIONS ( this has not to be a negative point ↵
but to remember we should assume reponsible attitudes).
>>
>> However we will revise the model to see if we can make any improvement ↵
to make it clear, we are working also in a graph interface to show some data in ↵
graphical form.
>> Best wishes
>> Reme
>>
>>
>>>
>>>> R. Melero
>>>> IATA, CSIC
>>>> Avda Agustín Escardino 7, 46980 Paterna (Valencia), Spain
>>>> TEl +34 96 390 00 22. Fax 96 363 63 01
>>>> E-mail
>>>> rmelero AT iata.csic.es
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> http://www.accesoabierto.net
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> --
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>
>> --
>> To unsubscribe from the BOAI Forum, use the form on this page:
>> http://www.soros.org/openaccess/forum.shtml?f
>>
>
>
> --
> To unsubscribe from the BOAI Forum, use the form on this page:
> http://www.soros.org/openaccess/forum.shtml?f
>
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Good afternoon everybody,
Following the ongoing discussion in which the CSIC (Spanish National
Research Council) and its open access efforts have been mentioned, we would
like to clarify the following:
The CSIC Presidency signed the Berlin Declaration on Open Access in January
2006, and as a result of it the Spanish National Research Council is driving
and implementing open access principles through 2 institutional initiatives:
-Digital.CSIC (https://digital.csic.es/) is the institutional repository
that provides open access to, organises and preserves the scientific output
resulting from the research activities by CSIC 147 institutes and centers.
The repository is a project by CSIC Libraries Coordination Unit.
-Revistas-CSIC (http://revistas.csic.es/) provides open access to the 35
scientific Journals published by the institution, covering a wide variety of
scientific disciplines. To date, 14 Journals provide immediate open access,
while 22 apply an embargo period of six months. Before the end of this year,
at least 4 more Journals are planned to move to full OA. Revistas-CSIC is a
project run by the CSIC Publication Department, and is a member of OASPA
under the category of OA Professional Publishing Organization.
These 2 initiatives fall within the CSIC Vice-presidency of Organization and
Institutional Relations.
To date, CSIC does not have an open access institutional mandate. In the
absence of a nation-wide open access related law yet, there are regional
laws in favour of open access that have a direct effect on CSIC, such as
that of the Government of the Community of Madrid.
Thus, MELIBEA should not be considered a CSIC institutional project.
Best wishes,
Agnès Ponsati, Director of CSIC Libraries Coordination Unit
Ramón Rodríguez, Coordinator of Revistas-CSIC
-----Mensaje original-----
De: boai-forum-bounces AT ecs.soton.ac.uk
[mailto:boai-forum-bounces AT ecs.soton.ac.uk] En nombre de Stevan Harnad
Enviado el: lunes, 19 de julio de 2010 15:56
Para: boai-forum AT ecs.soton.ac.uk
CC: SPARC Open Access Forum; JISC-REPOSITORIES AT JISCMAIL.AC.UK;
AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM AT LISTSERVER.SIGMAXI.ORG
Asunto: [BOAI] Re: OA policies and their "weight"
Dear Reme, if I may also make an intervention in your exchange with Steve
Hitchcock about the MELIBEA OA policy evaluator:
http://www.accesoabierto.net/politicas/
The MELIBEA service is extremely timely and promising, and could be
potentially useful and even influential in shaping OA mandates -- but that
makes it all the more important to get it right, rather than releasing
MELIBEA prematurely, when it still risks increasing confusion rather than
providing clarity and direction.
You are right to point out that -- unlike the CSIC's University Ranking and
the Repository Ranking -- the policy evaluator is not really a ranking. But
you have set up the composite algorithm and the graphics to make it a
ranking just the same.
You are also point out, correctly, that the policy criteria for institutions
and funders are not (and should not be) the same. Yet, with the MELIBEA
coding as well as the algorithm, they are treated the same way.
You also point out, rightly, that gold OA publishing policy is not central
to institutional OA policy making, yet there it is, as part of the MELIBEA
algorithm.
You also point out that the color code has nothing to do with the ↵
"green" OA
coding -- yet there it is, competing with the widespread use of green to
designate self-archiving, and thereby causing confusion, both overt and
covert.
I would be more than happy to give you feedback on every aspect of MELIBEA
-- it could be a useful and natural complement to the ROARMAP registry of OA
policies.
But as it is designed now, I can only agree with Steve Hitchcock's points
and conclude that consulting MELIBEA today would be likely to induce
confusion and would not help in bringing the all-important focus and
direction to OA policy-making that I am sure CSIC, too, seeks, and seeks to
help bring about.
Here are just a few prima facie points:
(1) Since MELIBEA is not, and should not be construed as a ranking of OA
policies -- especially because it includes both institutional and funder
policies -- it is important NOT to plug it into an algorithm until and
unless the algorithm has first been carefully tested, with consultation, to
make sure it weights policy criteria in a way that optimizes OA progress and
guides policy-makers in the right direction.
(2) For this reason, it is more important to allow users to generate
separate flat lists of institutions or funders on the various policy
criteria, considered and compared independently, rather than on the basis of
a prematurely and arbitrarily weighted joint algorithm.
(3) This is all the more important since the data are based on less then 200
institutions, whereas the CSIC University Rankings are based on thousands.
Since the population is still so small, MELIBEA risks having a
disproportionate effect on initial conditions and hence direction-setting;
all the more reason NOT to amplify noise and indirection by assigning
untested initial weights without carefully thinking through and weighing the
consequences.
(4) A potential internal cross-validator of some of the criteria would be a
reliable measure of outcome -- but that requires much more attention to
estimating the annual size and growth-rate of each repository (in terms of
OA's target contents, which are full-text articles), normalized for
institution size and annual total target output. Policy criteria (such as
request/require or immediate/delayed) should be cross-validated against
these outcome measures (such as percentage and growth rate of annual target
output).
(5) The MELIBEA color coding needs to be revised, and revised quickly, if
there is to be an algorithm at all. All those arbitrary colors in the
display of single repositories as ranked by the algorithm are both
unnecessary and confusing. The objective should be to order and focus
clearly and intuitively. Whatever is correlated with more green OA output
(such as a higher level or faster growth rate in OA's target content) should
be coded as darker or bigger shades of green. The same should be true for
the policy criteria, separately and jointly: in each case, request/require,
delayed/immediate, etc., the greenward polarity is obvious and intuitive.
This should be reflected in the graphics as well as in any comparative
rankings.
(6) If you include repositories with no OA policy at all (i.e., just a
repository and an open invitation to deposit) then all you are doing is
duplicating ROAR and ROARMAP, whereas the purpose, presumably, of MELIBEA,
is to highlight, weigh and compare specific policy differences among (the
very few) repositories that DO have policies.
(7) The sign-up data --
http://www.accesoabierto.net/politicas/nueva.php?directorio=politicas -- are
also rather confusing; the criteria are not always consistent, relevant or
applicable. The sign-up seems to be designed to make a funder mandate the
generic option, whereas this is quite the opposite of reality. There are far
more institutions and institutional repositories and policies than funders.
There should be separate criterial lists for institutional policies and for
funder policies; they are not the same. There is also far too much focus on
gold OA policy and payment. If included at all, this should only be at the
end, as an addendum, not the focus at the beginning, and on a par with green
OA policy.
(8) There is also potential confusion on the matter of "waivers": ↵
There are
two aspects of a mandate. One concerns whether or not deposit is required
(and if so, whether that requirement can be waived) and the other concerns
whether or not rights-reservation is required (and if so, whether that
requirement can be waived). These two distinct and independent
requirements/waivers are completely conflated in the current version of
MELIBEA.
I hope there will be substantive consultation and conscientious redesign of
these and other aspects of MELIBEA before it is can recommended for serious
consideration and use.
Stevan Harnad
On 2010-07-19, at 5:18 AM, Remedios Melero wrote:
> Dear Steve,
>
> I apologize for the delay in my response, but I will try to give some
explanations to make clear some issues you raised in your message (my
comments are in capital letters, to distinguish them from yours)
>
>
>
> El 15/07/2010 11:22, Steve Hitchcock escribió:
>> Reme, Thank you for bringing this new service to our attention. OA
policies are vitally important to the development of institutional
repositories, and services that can highlight and bring attention to this
development can be valuable.
>>
>> There are a few aspects of the validation aspects of the new MELIBEA
service that confuse, and possibly trouble, me. The first is the main
indicator, %OAval, which is the most visible result for a policy. What do
you expect this will tell people about a given policy? I randomly selected a
couple of policies, one of which was for my own school, to find they each
scored about 50%. I would expect these to be among the leaders in terms of
OA policies, so this seems a surprisingly unhelpful score.
>>
>> So what's the explanation? Note that the objects being evaluated are
institutional OA policies; they are effectively being presented in relation
to institutional repositories when the policy specifies where to archive is
an IR with a URL. It seems that the scores include ratings for OA
publication policy, libre vs gratis OA, publisher pdf, sanctions (score if
Yes), incentives (score if Yes), etc., some of which an institution might
specify but which might not apply to an IR
>> http://www.accesoabierto.net/politicas/politicas_estructura.php
>> . However you weight these factors they are still contributors to the
overall score, so a policy that is specific to an IR is immediately
handicapped, or appears to be unless there is more context to understand the
scores.
>>
>>
>>
> AS I WROTE BEFORE THIS IS NOT A RANKING, IT IS NOT THE AIM OF MELIBEA BUT
TO HAVE A KIND OF REFERENCE ON WHAT TOPICS, ISSUES OR MATTERS TO BE INCLUDED
IN AN OA POLICY. WE ARE TALKING ABOUT INSTITUTIONAL POLICIES OF DIFFERENTE
NATURE, NOT ABOUT REPOSITORIES POLICIES. IF THE POLICY ONLY TALKS ABOUT THE
REQUIREMENT TO DEPOSIT IN A REPOSITORY, IT SHOULD SPECIFY WHAT, WHEN AND
UNDER WHAT CONDITIONS, IF ANY. IT IS NOT THE SAME TO SAY WHAT DOCUMENTS AND
WHAT VERSIONS AND WHEN THAN SIMPLY SAY " ANY" OR "AS SOON AS ↵
POSSIBLE" (this
could be a month after publication or years after publication, depending on
one's criteria). GOLD ROUTE, NEVER IS REQUIRED ACCORDING OUR APPROACH ↵
("Gold
(Recommended in OA journals") AND NOT ALL OA JOURNALS ARE SUPPORTED BY ↵
SAME
ECONOMIC MODEL.
>
>
>> Which leads me to another question on the visualisation of the ↵
validator,
and its use of green, gold (and red) in the meter. Do the green and gold
refer the the classic OA colours? This would be quite convenient, since it
would appear that the green repository policies I mentioned above are
achieving almost full scores in the green zone of the meter. However, I
suspect this cannot be the case, because it would assume that institutions
must have a green AND gold policy, but not simply gold (whatever argument
could be put for that).
>>
>>
> COLORS DO NOT MEAN THAT, WE WANTED JUST TO DISTINGUISH ZONES LIKE IT WERE
A SPECTRA.
>
>> It is important that new services should help reveal and promote OA
policies, as you seek to do, but at the same time not to prejudice the
development of such policies by mixing and not fairly separating the
contributing factors, especially where these relate to different types of
OA.
>>
>>
> I DO NOT THINK WE ARE MIXING, IN FACT THERE TWO MODELS, ONE FOR UNIV. AND
RESEARCH CNETRES AND ANOTHER FOR FUNDERS AND GOV. INSTITUTIONS AND THE
QUESTIONS FOR THEM ARE DIFFERENT, for instance, FOR A FUNDER THE QUESTION
ABOUT DEPOSIT O THESIS IS NOT APPLICABLE.
> IN SUMMARY, OUR MODEL COULD NOT BE "PERFECT" BUT I IS ONE, WHICH ↵
COULD
DETECT DIFFERENCES BETWEEN REQUEST AND REQUIRE, WHO, WHAT , WHEN IF THERE
ARE ANY INCENTIVES OR SANCTIONS ( this has not to be a negative point but
to remember we should assume reponsible attitudes).
>
> However we will revise the model to see if we can make any improvement to
make it clear, we are working also in a graph interface to show some data in
graphical form.
> Best wishes
> Reme
>
>>
>>> R. Melero
>>> IATA, CSIC
>>> Avda Agustín Escardino 7, 46980 Paterna (Valencia), Spain
>>> TEl +34 96 390 00 22. Fax 96 363 63 01
>>> E-mail
>>> rmelero AT iata.csic.es
>>>
>>>
>>> http://www.accesoabierto.net
>>>
>>>
>>> --
>>>
>>>
>
>
> --
> To unsubscribe from the BOAI Forum, use the form on this page:
> http://www.soros.org/openaccess/forum.shtml?f
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On Tue, 20 Jul 2010, Frederick Friend wrote:
> I am glad that Isabel Bernal has sent this message about the excellent OA
> developments in Spain. I was becoming concerned that comments on the ↵
MELIBEA
> service - whether justified or unjustified - were giving the impression ↵
that
> our Spanish colleagues are adopting a faulty approach to OA
(1) The (friendly) critique was of MELIBEA, not of CSIC or Spain.
(2) The critique was not of an approach to OA but of an approach to
evaluating approaches to OA.
(3) MELIBEA is a (potentially important) project of a CSIC lab (IATA)
that was presented at OR2010 http://accesoabierto.net/node/61
> (can any way of bringing OA be faulty?).
Yes it can (e.g., if it is unsuccessful, or needlessly less successful
than it could be).
> I have looked at both the Digital.CSIC and
> Revistas.CSIC sites, and I found them attractive and very easy to use ↵
(which
> unfortunately cannot be said about all repositories).
There are more attractive repositories and less attractive repositories.
Their appearance matters infinitely less than their success in capturing
their total target OA contents (which can only be determined by
comparing their annual deposits to their total annual target output).
OA contents are not searched and retrieved at the repository level, but
at the harvester level. Hence the attractiveness of an individual
repository, be it institutional or central, is of rather minor
importance.
(Neither the attractiveness nor even the deposit rate of the CSIC
repository is relevant to the point under discussion, which is about
how to go about evaluating institutional and funder OA policies, e.g.,
as MELIBEA is being designed to do.)
> The policies underpinning the dual approach make a lot of sense
> as national policies.
I am not sure what "dual approach" policy is the intended referent ↵
here,
or whose, but I assume it is (1) green OA self-archiving mandates and
(2) gold OA publishing payment commitments.
The latter (2) only makes sense after the former (1) has been adopted.
As Isabel Bernal indicates below, CSIC has not yet mandated green OA
(1).
None of this has anything to do with evaluating MELIBEA, the evaluator
of OA policies.
> OA supporters in every country have to encourage OA in whatever
> way suits their political and cultural environment, and it seems
> to me that this is what our Spanish colleagues are doing very effectively.
Until a country or funder or institution mandates green OA
self-archiving, it has not yet been effective in promoting or providing
OA.
the substantive is wondering about what might be the substantive issue
underlying this exchange with Fred, it is the usual one, about putting
the gold cart before the green horse.)
Stevan Harnad
> Fred Friend
> JISC Scholarly Communication Consultant
> Honorary Director Scholarly Communication UCL
>
>
> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Isabel Bernal"
> <isabel.bernal AT BIB.CSIC.ES>
> To: <JISC-REPOSITORIES AT JISCMAIL.AC.UK>
> Sent: Tuesday, July 20, 2010 5:27 PM
> Subject: Re: [BOAI] Re: OA policies and their "weight"
>
>
> Good afternoon everybody,
>
> Following the ongoing discussion in which the CSIC (Spanish National
> Research Council) and its open access efforts have been mentioned, we ↵
would
> like to clarify the following:
>
> The CSIC Presidency signed the Berlin Declaration on Open Access in ↵
January
> 2006, and as a result of it the Spanish National Research Council is ↵
driving
> and implementing open access principles through 2 institutional ↵
initiatives:
>
> -Digital.CSIC (https://digital.csic.es/) is the institutional repository
> that provides open access to, organises and preserves the scientific ↵
output
> resulting from the research activities by CSIC 147 institutes and centers.
> The repository is a project by CSIC Libraries Coordination Unit.
>
> -Revistas-CSIC (http://revistas.csic.es/) provides open access to the 35
> scientific Journals published by the institution, covering a wide variety ↵
of
> scientific disciplines. To date, 14 Journals provide immediate open ↵
access,
> while 22 apply an embargo period of six months. Before the end of this ↵
year,
> at least 4 more Journals are planned to move to full OA. Revistas-CSIC is ↵
a
> project run by the CSIC Publication Department, and is a member of OASPA
> under the category of OA Professional Publishing Organization.
>
> These 2 initiatives fall within the CSIC Vice-presidency of Organization ↵
and
> Institutional Relations.
>
> To date, CSIC does not have an open access institutional mandate. In the
> absence of a nation-wide open access related law yet, there are regional
> laws in favour of open access that have a direct effect on CSIC, such as
> that of the Government of the Community of Madrid.
>
> Thus, MELIBEA should not be considered a CSIC institutional project.
>
> Best wishes,
>
> Agnès Ponsati, Director of CSIC Libraries Coordination Unit
>
> Ramón Rodríguez, Coordinator of Revistas-CSIC
>
>
>
> -----Mensaje original-----
> De: boai-forum-bounces AT ecs.soton.ac.uk
> [mailto:boai-forum-bounces AT ecs.soton.ac.uk] En nombre de Stevan Harnad
> Enviado el: lunes, 19 de julio de 2010 15:56
> Para: boai-forum AT ecs.soton.ac.uk
> CC: SPARC Open Access Forum; JISC-REPOSITORIES AT JISCMAIL.AC.UK;
> AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM AT LISTSERVER.SIGMAXI.ORG
> Asunto: [BOAI] Re: OA policies and their "weight"
>
> Dear Reme, if I may also make an intervention in your exchange with Steve
> Hitchcock about the MELIBEA OA policy evaluator:
> http://www.accesoabierto.net/politicas/
>
> The MELIBEA service is extremely timely and promising, and could be
> potentially useful and even influential in shaping OA mandates -- but that
> makes it all the more important to get it right, rather than releasing
> MELIBEA prematurely, when it still risks increasing confusion rather than
> providing clarity and direction.
>
> You are right to point out that -- unlike the CSIC's University Ranking ↵
and
> the Repository Ranking -- the policy evaluator is not really a ranking. ↵
But
> you have set up the composite algorithm and the graphics to make it a
> ranking just the same.
>
> You are also point out, correctly, that the policy criteria for ↵
institutions
> and funders are not (and should not be) the same. Yet, with the MELIBEA
> coding as well as the algorithm, they are treated the same way.
>
> You also point out, rightly, that gold OA publishing policy is not central
> to institutional OA policy making, yet there it is, as part of the MELIBEA
> algorithm.
>
> You also point out that the color code has nothing to do with the ↵
"green" OA
> coding -- yet there it is, competing with the widespread use of green to
> designate self-archiving, and thereby causing confusion, both overt and
> covert.
>
> I would be more than happy to give you feedback on every aspect of MELIBEA
> -- it could be a useful and natural complement to the ROARMAP registry of ↵
OA
> policies.
>
> But as it is designed now, I can only agree with Steve Hitchcock's points
> and conclude that consulting MELIBEA today would be likely to induce
> confusion and would not help in bringing the all-important focus and
> direction to OA policy-making that I am sure CSIC, too, seeks, and seeks ↵
to
> help bring about.
>
> Here are just a few prima facie points:
>
> (1) Since MELIBEA is not, and should not be construed as a ranking of OA
> policies -- especially because it includes both institutional and funder
> policies -- it is important NOT to plug it into an algorithm until and
> unless the algorithm has first been carefully tested, with consultation, ↵
to
> make sure it weights policy criteria in a way that optimizes OA progress ↵
and
> guides policy-makers in the right direction.
>
> (2) For this reason, it is more important to allow users to generate
> separate flat lists of institutions or funders on the various policy
> criteria, considered and compared independently, rather than on the basis ↵
of
> a prematurely and arbitrarily weighted joint algorithm.
>
> (3) This is all the more important since the data are based on less then ↵
200
> institutions, whereas the CSIC University Rankings are based on thousands.
> Since the population is still so small, MELIBEA risks having a
> disproportionate effect on initial conditions and hence direction-setting;
> all the more reason NOT to amplify noise and indirection by assigning
> untested initial weights without carefully thinking through and weighing ↵
the
> consequences.
>
> (4) A potential internal cross-validator of some of the criteria would be ↵
a
> reliable measure of outcome -- but that requires much more attention to
> estimating the annual size and growth-rate of each repository (in terms of
> OA's target contents, which are full-text articles), normalized for
> institution size and annual total target output. Policy criteria (such as
> request/require or immediate/delayed) should be cross-validated against
> these outcome measures (such as percentage and growth rate of annual ↵
target
> output).
>
> (5) The MELIBEA color coding needs to be revised, and revised quickly, if
> there is to be an algorithm at all. All those arbitrary colors in the
> display of single repositories as ranked by the algorithm are both
> unnecessary and confusing. The objective should be to order and focus
> clearly and intuitively. Whatever is correlated with more green OA output
> (such as a higher level or faster growth rate in OA's target content) ↵
should
> be coded as darker or bigger shades of green. The same should be true for
> the policy criteria, separately and jointly: in each case, ↵
request/require,
> delayed/immediate, etc., the greenward polarity is obvious and intuitive.
> This should be reflected in the graphics as well as in any comparative
> rankings.
>
> (6) If you include repositories with no OA policy at all (i.e., just a
> repository and an open invitation to deposit) then all you are doing is
> duplicating ROAR and ROARMAP, whereas the purpose, presumably, of MELIBEA,
> is to highlight, weigh and compare specific policy differences among (the
> very few) repositories that DO have policies.
>
> (7) The sign-up data --
> http://www.accesoabierto.net/politicas/nueva.php?directorio=politicas -- ↵
are
> also rather confusing; the criteria are not always consistent, relevant or
> applicable. The sign-up seems to be designed to make a funder mandate the
> generic option, whereas this is quite the opposite of reality. There are ↵
far
> more institutions and institutional repositories and policies than ↵
funders.
> There should be separate criterial lists for institutional policies and ↵
for
> funder policies; they are not the same. There is also far too much focus ↵
on
> gold OA policy and payment. If included at all, this should only be at the
> end, as an addendum, not the focus at the beginning, and on a par with ↵
green
> OA policy.
>
> (8) There is also potential confusion on the matter of ↵
"waivers": There are
> two aspects of a mandate. One concerns whether or not deposit is required
> (and if so, whether that requirement can be waived) and the other concerns
> whether or not rights-reservation is required (and if so, whether that
> requirement can be waived). These two distinct and independent
> requirements/waivers are completely conflated in the current version of
> MELIBEA.
>
> I hope there will be substantive consultation and conscientious redesign ↵
of
> these and other aspects of MELIBEA before it is can recommended for ↵
serious
> consideration and use.
>
> Stevan Harnad
>
>
> On 2010-07-19, at 5:18 AM, Remedios Melero wrote:
>
>> Dear Steve,
>>
>> I apologize for the delay in my response, but I will try to give some
> explanations to make clear some issues you raised in your message (my
> comments are in capital letters, to distinguish them from yours)
>>
>>
>>
>> El 15/07/2010 11:22, Steve Hitchcock escribió:
>> > Reme, Thank you for bringing this new service to our ↵
attention. OA
> policies are vitally important to the development of institutional
> repositories, and services that can highlight and bring attention to this
> development can be valuable.
>> >
>> > There are a few aspects of the validation aspects of the new ↵
MELIBEA
> service that confuse, and possibly trouble, me. The first is the main
> indicator, %OAval, which is the most visible result for a policy. What do
> you expect this will tell people about a given policy? I randomly selected ↵
a
> couple of policies, one of which was for my own school, to find they each
> scored about 50%. I would expect these to be among the leaders in terms of
> OA policies, so this seems a surprisingly unhelpful score.
>> >
>> > So what's the explanation? Note that the objects being evaluated ↵
are
> institutional OA policies; they are effectively being presented in ↵
relation
> to institutional repositories when the policy specifies where to archive ↵
is
> an IR with a URL. It seems that the scores include ratings for OA
> publication policy, libre vs gratis OA, publisher pdf, sanctions (score if
> Yes), incentives (score if Yes), etc., some of which an institution might
> specify but which might not apply to an IR
>> > http://www.accesoabierto.net/politicas/politicas_estructura.php
>> > . However you weight these factors they are still contributors ↵
to the
> overall score, so a policy that is specific to an IR is immediately
> handicapped, or appears to be unless there is more context to understand ↵
the
> scores.
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> AS I WROTE BEFORE THIS IS NOT A RANKING, IT IS NOT THE AIM OF MELIBEA ↵
BUT
> TO HAVE A KIND OF REFERENCE ON WHAT TOPICS, ISSUES OR MATTERS TO BE ↵
INCLUDED
> IN AN OA POLICY. WE ARE TALKING ABOUT INSTITUTIONAL POLICIES OF DIFFERENTE
> NATURE, NOT ABOUT REPOSITORIES POLICIES. IF THE POLICY ONLY TALKS ABOUT ↵
THE
> REQUIREMENT TO DEPOSIT IN A REPOSITORY, IT SHOULD SPECIFY WHAT, WHEN AND
> UNDER WHAT CONDITIONS, IF ANY. IT IS NOT THE SAME TO SAY WHAT DOCUMENTS ↵
AND
> WHAT VERSIONS AND WHEN THAN SIMPLY SAY " ANY" OR "AS SOON ↵
AS POSSIBLE" (this
> could be a month after publication or years after publication, depending ↵
on
> one's criteria). GOLD ROUTE, NEVER IS REQUIRED ACCORDING OUR APPROACH ↵
("Gold
> (Recommended in OA journals") AND NOT ALL OA JOURNALS ARE SUPPORTED ↵
BY SAME
> ECONOMIC MODEL.
>>
>>
>> > Which leads me to another question on the visualisation of the
>> > validator,
> and its use of green, gold (and red) in the meter. Do the green and gold
> refer the the classic OA colours? This would be quite convenient, since it
> would appear that the green repository policies I mentioned above are
> achieving almost full scores in the green zone of the meter. However, I
> suspect this cannot be the case, because it would assume that institutions
> must have a green AND gold policy, but not simply gold (whatever argument
> could be put for that).
>> >
>> >
>> COLORS DO NOT MEAN THAT, WE WANTED JUST TO DISTINGUISH ZONES LIKE IT ↵
WERE
> A SPECTRA.
>>
>> > It is important that new services should help reveal and promote ↵
OA
> policies, as you seek to do, but at the same time not to prejudice the
> development of such policies by mixing and not fairly separating the
> contributing factors, especially where these relate to different types of
> OA.
>> >
>> >
>> I DO NOT THINK WE ARE MIXING, IN FACT THERE TWO MODELS, ONE FOR UNIV. ↵
AND
> RESEARCH CNETRES AND ANOTHER FOR FUNDERS AND GOV. INSTITUTIONS AND THE
> QUESTIONS FOR THEM ARE DIFFERENT, for instance, FOR A FUNDER THE QUESTION
> ABOUT DEPOSIT O THESIS IS NOT APPLICABLE.
>> IN SUMMARY, OUR MODEL COULD NOT BE "PERFECT" BUT I IS ONE, ↵
WHICH COULD
> DETECT DIFFERENCES BETWEEN REQUEST AND REQUIRE, WHO, WHAT , WHEN IF THERE
> ARE ANY INCENTIVES OR SANCTIONS ( this has not to be a negative point but
> to remember we should assume reponsible attitudes).
>>
>> However we will revise the model to see if we can make any ↵
improvement to
> make it clear, we are working also in a graph interface to show some data ↵
in
> graphical form.
>> Best wishes
>> Reme
>>
>> >
>> > > R. Melero
>> > > IATA, CSIC
>> > > Avda Agustín Escardino 7, 46980 Paterna (Valencia), Spain
>> > > TEl +34 96 390 00 22. Fax 96 363 63 01
>> > > E-mail
>> > > rmelero AT iata.csic.es
>> > >
>> > >
>> > > http://www.accesoabierto.net
>> > >
>> > >
>> > > --
>> > >
>> > >
>>
>>
>> --
>> To unsubscribe from the BOAI Forum, use the form on this page:
>> http://www.soros.org/openaccess/forum.shtml?f
>
>
>
> --
> To unsubscribe from the BOAI Forum, use the form on this page:
> http://www.soros.org/openaccess/forum.shtml?f
>

On Tue, 20 Jul 2010, Frederick Friend wrote:
> I am glad that Isabel Bernal has sent this message about the excellent OA
> developments in Spain. I was becoming concerned that comments on the ↵
MELIBEA
> service - whether justified or unjustified - were giving the impression ↵
that
> our Spanish colleagues are adopting a faulty approach to OA
(1) The (friendly) critique was of MELIBEA, not of CSIC or Spain.
(2) The critique was not of an approach to OA but of an approach to
evaluating approaches to OA.
(3) MELIBEA is a (potentially important) project of a CSIC lab (IATA)
that was presented at OR2010 http://accesoabierto.net/node/61
> (can any way of bringing OA be faulty?).
Yes it can (e.g., if it is unsuccessful, or needlessly less successful
than it could be).
> I have looked at both the Digital.CSIC and
> Revistas.CSIC sites, and I found them attractive and very easy to use ↵
(which
> unfortunately cannot be said about all repositories).
There are more attractive repositories and less attractive repositories.
Their appearance matters infinitely less than their success in capturing
their total target OA contents (which can only be determined by
comparing their annual deposits to their total annual target output).
OA contents are not searched and retrieved at the repository level, but
at the harvester level. Hence the attractiveness of an individual
repository, be it institutional or central, is of rather minor
importance.
(Neither the attractiveness nor even the deposit rate of the CSIC
repository is relevant to the point under discussion, which is about
how to go about evaluating institutional and funder OA policies, e.g.,
as MELIBEA is being designed to do.)
> The policies underpinning the dual approach make a lot of sense
> as national policies.
I am not sure what "dual approach" policy is the intended referent ↵
here,
or whose, but I assume it is (1) green OA self-archiving mandates and
(2) gold OA publishing payment commitments.
The latter (2) only makes sense after the former (1) has been adopted.
As Isabel Bernal indicates below, CSIC has not yet mandated green OA
(1).
None of this has anything to do with evaluating MELIBEA, the evaluator
of OA policies.
> OA supporters in every country have to encourage OA in whatever
> way suits their political and cultural environment, and it seems
> to me that this is what our Spanish colleagues are doing very effectively.
Until a country or funder or institution mandates green OA
self-archiving, it has not yet been effective in promoting or providing
OA.
the substantive is wondering about what might be the substantive issue
underlying this exchange with Fred, it is the usual one, about putting
the gold cart before the green horse.)
Stevan Harnad
> Fred Friend
> JISC Scholarly Communication Consultant
> Honorary Director Scholarly Communication UCL
>
>
> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Isabel Bernal"
> <isabel.bernal AT BIB.CSIC.ES>
> To: <JISC-REPOSITORIES AT JISCMAIL.AC.UK>
> Sent: Tuesday, July 20, 2010 5:27 PM
> Subject: Re: [BOAI] Re: OA policies and their "weight"
>
>
> Good afternoon everybody,
>
> Following the ongoing discussion in which the CSIC (Spanish National
> Research Council) and its open access efforts have been mentioned, we ↵
would
> like to clarify the following:
>
> The CSIC Presidency signed the Berlin Declaration on Open Access in ↵
January
> 2006, and as a result of it the Spanish National Research Council is ↵
driving
> and implementing open access principles through 2 institutional ↵
initiatives:
>
> -Digital.CSIC (https://digital.csic.es/) is the institutional repository
> that provides open access to, organises and preserves the scientific ↵
output
> resulting from the research activities by CSIC 147 institutes and centers.
> The repository is a project by CSIC Libraries Coordination Unit.
>
> -Revistas-CSIC (http://revistas.csic.es/) provides open access to the 35
> scientific Journals published by the institution, covering a wide variety ↵
of
> scientific disciplines. To date, 14 Journals provide immediate open ↵
access,
> while 22 apply an embargo period of six months. Before the end of this ↵
year,
> at least 4 more Journals are planned to move to full OA. Revistas-CSIC is ↵
a
> project run by the CSIC Publication Department, and is a member of OASPA
> under the category of OA Professional Publishing Organization.
>
> These 2 initiatives fall within the CSIC Vice-presidency of Organization ↵
and
> Institutional Relations.
>
> To date, CSIC does not have an open access institutional mandate. In the
> absence of a nation-wide open access related law yet, there are regional
> laws in favour of open access that have a direct effect on CSIC, such as
> that of the Government of the Community of Madrid.
>
> Thus, MELIBEA should not be considered a CSIC institutional project.
>
> Best wishes,
>
> Agnès Ponsati, Director of CSIC Libraries Coordination Unit
>
> Ramón Rodríguez, Coordinator of Revistas-CSIC
>
>
>
> -----Mensaje original-----
> De: boai-forum-bounces AT ecs.soton.ac.uk
> [mailto:boai-forum-bounces AT ecs.soton.ac.uk] En nombre de Stevan Harnad
> Enviado el: lunes, 19 de julio de 2010 15:56
> Para: boai-forum AT ecs.soton.ac.uk
> CC: SPARC Open Access Forum; JISC-REPOSITORIES AT JISCMAIL.AC.UK;
> AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM AT LISTSERVER.SIGMAXI.ORG
> Asunto: [BOAI] Re: OA policies and their "weight"
>
> Dear Reme, if I may also make an intervention in your exchange with Steve
> Hitchcock about the MELIBEA OA policy evaluator:
> http://www.accesoabierto.net/politicas/
>
> The MELIBEA service is extremely timely and promising, and could be
> potentially useful and even influential in shaping OA mandates -- but that
> makes it all the more important to get it right, rather than releasing
> MELIBEA prematurely, when it still risks increasing confusion rather than
> providing clarity and direction.
>
> You are right to point out that -- unlike the CSIC's University Ranking ↵
and
> the Repository Ranking -- the policy evaluator is not really a ranking. ↵
But
> you have set up the composite algorithm and the graphics to make it a
> ranking just the same.
>
> You are also point out, correctly, that the policy criteria for ↵
institutions
> and funders are not (and should not be) the same. Yet, with the MELIBEA
> coding as well as the algorithm, they are treated the same way.
>
> You also point out, rightly, that gold OA publishing policy is not central
> to institutional OA policy making, yet there it is, as part of the MELIBEA
> algorithm.
>
> You also point out that the color code has nothing to do with the ↵
"green" OA
> coding -- yet there it is, competing with the widespread use of green to
> designate self-archiving, and thereby causing confusion, both overt and
> covert.
>
> I would be more than happy to give you feedback on every aspect of MELIBEA
> -- it could be a useful and natural complement to the ROARMAP registry of ↵
OA
> policies.
>
> But as it is designed now, I can only agree with Steve Hitchcock's points
> and conclude that consulting MELIBEA today would be likely to induce
> confusion and would not help in bringing the all-important focus and
> direction to OA policy-making that I am sure CSIC, too, seeks, and seeks ↵
to
> help bring about.
>
> Here are just a few prima facie points:
>
> (1) Since MELIBEA is not, and should not be construed as a ranking of OA
> policies -- especially because it includes both institutional and funder
> policies -- it is important NOT to plug it into an algorithm until and
> unless the algorithm has first been carefully tested, with consultation, ↵
to
> make sure it weights policy criteria in a way that optimizes OA progress ↵
and
> guides policy-makers in the right direction.
>
> (2) For this reason, it is more important to allow users to generate
> separate flat lists of institutions or funders on the various policy
> criteria, considered and compared independently, rather than on the basis ↵
of
> a prematurely and arbitrarily weighted joint algorithm.
>
> (3) This is all the more important since the data are based on less then ↵
200
> institutions, whereas the CSIC University Rankings are based on thousands.
> Since the population is still so small, MELIBEA risks having a
> disproportionate effect on initial conditions and hence direction-setting;
> all the more reason NOT to amplify noise and indirection by assigning
> untested initial weights without carefully thinking through and weighing ↵
the
> consequences.
>
> (4) A potential internal cross-validator of some of the criteria would be ↵
a
> reliable measure of outcome -- but that requires much more attention to
> estimating the annual size and growth-rate of each repository (in terms of
> OA's target contents, which are full-text articles), normalized for
> institution size and annual total target output. Policy criteria (such as
> request/require or immediate/delayed) should be cross-validated against
> these outcome measures (such as percentage and growth rate of annual ↵
target
> output).
>
> (5) The MELIBEA color coding needs to be revised, and revised quickly, if
> there is to be an algorithm at all. All those arbitrary colors in the
> display of single repositories as ranked by the algorithm are both
> unnecessary and confusing. The objective should be to order and focus
> clearly and intuitively. Whatever is correlated with more green OA output
> (such as a higher level or faster growth rate in OA's target content) ↵
should
> be coded as darker or bigger shades of green. The same should be true for
> the policy criteria, separately and jointly: in each case, ↵
request/require,
> delayed/immediate, etc., the greenward polarity is obvious and intuitive.
> This should be reflected in the graphics as well as in any comparative
> rankings.
>
> (6) If you include repositories with no OA policy at all (i.e., just a
> repository and an open invitation to deposit) then all you are doing is
> duplicating ROAR and ROARMAP, whereas the purpose, presumably, of MELIBEA,
> is to highlight, weigh and compare specific policy differences among (the
> very few) repositories that DO have policies.
>
> (7) The sign-up data --
> http://www.accesoabierto.net/politicas/nueva.php?directorio=politicas -- ↵
are
> also rather confusing; the criteria are not always consistent, relevant or
> applicable. The sign-up seems to be designed to make a funder mandate the
> generic option, whereas this is quite the opposite of reality. There are ↵
far
> more institutions and institutional repositories and policies than ↵
funders.
> There should be separate criterial lists for institutional policies and ↵
for
> funder policies; they are not the same. There is also far too much focus ↵
on
> gold OA policy and payment. If included at all, this should only be at the
> end, as an addendum, not the focus at the beginning, and on a par with ↵
green
> OA policy.
>
> (8) There is also potential confusion on the matter of ↵
"waivers": There are
> two aspects of a mandate. One concerns whether or not deposit is required
> (and if so, whether that requirement can be waived) and the other concerns
> whether or not rights-reservation is required (and if so, whether that
> requirement can be waived). These two distinct and independent
> requirements/waivers are completely conflated in the current version of
> MELIBEA.
>
> I hope there will be substantive consultation and conscientious redesign ↵
of
> these and other aspects of MELIBEA before it is can recommended for ↵
serious
> consideration and use.
>
> Stevan Harnad
>
>
> On 2010-07-19, at 5:18 AM, Remedios Melero wrote:
>
>> Dear Steve,
>>
>> I apologize for the delay in my response, but I will try to give some
> explanations to make clear some issues you raised in your message (my
> comments are in capital letters, to distinguish them from yours)
>>
>>
>>
>> El 15/07/2010 11:22, Steve Hitchcock escribió:
>> > Reme, Thank you for bringing this new service to our ↵
attention. OA
> policies are vitally important to the development of institutional
> repositories, and services that can highlight and bring attention to this
> development can be valuable.
>> >
>> > There are a few aspects of the validation aspects of the new ↵
MELIBEA
> service that confuse, and possibly trouble, me. The first is the main
> indicator, %OAval, which is the most visible result for a policy. What do
> you expect this will tell people about a given policy? I randomly selected ↵
a
> couple of policies, one of which was for my own school, to find they each
> scored about 50%. I would expect these to be among the leaders in terms of
> OA policies, so this seems a surprisingly unhelpful score.
>> >
>> > So what's the explanation? Note that the objects being evaluated ↵
are
> institutional OA policies; they are effectively being presented in ↵
relation
> to institutional repositories when the policy specifies where to archive ↵
is
> an IR with a URL. It seems that the scores include ratings for OA
> publication policy, libre vs gratis OA, publisher pdf, sanctions (score if
> Yes), incentives (score if Yes), etc., some of which an institution might
> specify but which might not apply to an IR
>> > http://www.accesoabierto.net/politicas/politicas_estructura.php
>> > . However you weight these factors they are still contributors ↵
to the
> overall score, so a policy that is specific to an IR is immediately
> handicapped, or appears to be unless there is more context to understand ↵
the
> scores.
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> AS I WROTE BEFORE THIS IS NOT A RANKING, IT IS NOT THE AIM OF MELIBEA ↵
BUT
> TO HAVE A KIND OF REFERENCE ON WHAT TOPICS, ISSUES OR MATTERS TO BE ↵
INCLUDED
> IN AN OA POLICY. WE ARE TALKING ABOUT INSTITUTIONAL POLICIES OF DIFFERENTE
> NATURE, NOT ABOUT REPOSITORIES POLICIES. IF THE POLICY ONLY TALKS ABOUT ↵
THE
> REQUIREMENT TO DEPOSIT IN A REPOSITORY, IT SHOULD SPECIFY WHAT, WHEN AND
> UNDER WHAT CONDITIONS, IF ANY. IT IS NOT THE SAME TO SAY WHAT DOCUMENTS ↵
AND
> WHAT VERSIONS AND WHEN THAN SIMPLY SAY " ANY" OR "AS SOON ↵
AS POSSIBLE" (this
> could be a month after publication or years after publication, depending ↵
on
> one's criteria). GOLD ROUTE, NEVER IS REQUIRED ACCORDING OUR APPROACH ↵
("Gold
> (Recommended in OA journals") AND NOT ALL OA JOURNALS ARE SUPPORTED ↵
BY SAME
> ECONOMIC MODEL.
>>
>>
>> > Which leads me to another question on the visualisation of the
>> > validator,
> and its use of green, gold (and red) in the meter. Do the green and gold
> refer the the classic OA colours? This would be quite convenient, since it
> would appear that the green repository policies I mentioned above are
> achieving almost full scores in the green zone of the meter. However, I
> suspect this cannot be the case, because it would assume that institutions
> must have a green AND gold policy, but not simply gold (whatever argument
> could be put for that).
>> >
>> >
>> COLORS DO NOT MEAN THAT, WE WANTED JUST TO DISTINGUISH ZONES LIKE IT ↵
WERE
> A SPECTRA.
>>
>> > It is important that new services should help reveal and promote ↵
OA
> policies, as you seek to do, but at the same time not to prejudice the
> development of such policies by mixing and not fairly separating the
> contributing factors, especially where these relate to different types of
> OA.
>> >
>> >
>> I DO NOT THINK WE ARE MIXING, IN FACT THERE TWO MODELS, ONE FOR UNIV. ↵
AND
> RESEARCH CNETRES AND ANOTHER FOR FUNDERS AND GOV. INSTITUTIONS AND THE
> QUESTIONS FOR THEM ARE DIFFERENT, for instance, FOR A FUNDER THE QUESTION
> ABOUT DEPOSIT O THESIS IS NOT APPLICABLE.
>> IN SUMMARY, OUR MODEL COULD NOT BE "PERFECT" BUT I IS ONE, ↵
WHICH COULD
> DETECT DIFFERENCES BETWEEN REQUEST AND REQUIRE, WHO, WHAT , WHEN IF THERE
> ARE ANY INCENTIVES OR SANCTIONS ( this has not to be a negative point but
> to remember we should assume reponsible attitudes).
>>
>> However we will revise the model to see if we can make any ↵
improvement to
> make it clear, we are working also in a graph interface to show some data ↵
in
> graphical form.
>> Best wishes
>> Reme
>>
>> >
>> > > R. Melero
>> > > IATA, CSIC
>> > > Avda Agustín Escardino 7, 46980 Paterna (Valencia), Spain
>> > > TEl +34 96 390 00 22. Fax 96 363 63 01
>> > > E-mail
>> > > rmelero AT iata.csic.es
>> > >
>> > >
>> > > http://www.accesoabierto.net
>> > >
>> > >
>> > > --
>> > >
>> > >
>>
>>
>> --
>> To unsubscribe from the BOAI Forum, use the form on this page:
>> http://www.soros.org/openaccess/forum.shtml?f
>
>
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Good afternoon everybody,
Following the ongoing discussion in which the CSIC (Spanish National
Research Council) and its open access efforts have been mentioned, we would
like to clarify the following:
The CSIC Presidency signed the Berlin Declaration on Open Access in January
2006, and as a result of it the Spanish National Research Council is driving
and implementing open access principles through 2 institutional initiatives:
-Digital.CSIC (https://digital.csic.es/) is the institutional repository
that provides open access to, organises and preserves the scientific output
resulting from the research activities by CSIC 147 institutes and centers.
The repository is a project by CSIC Libraries Coordination Unit.
-Revistas-CSIC (http://revistas.csic.es/) provides open access to the 35
scientific Journals published by the institution, covering a wide variety of
scientific disciplines. To date, 14 Journals provide immediate open access,
while 22 apply an embargo period of six months. Before the end of this year,
at least 4 more Journals are planned to move to full OA. Revistas-CSIC is a
project run by the CSIC Publication Department, and is a member of OASPA
under the category of OA Professional Publishing Organization.
These 2 initiatives fall within the CSIC Vice-presidency of Organization and
Institutional Relations.
To date, CSIC does not have an open access institutional mandate. In the
absence of a nation-wide open access related law yet, there are regional
laws in favour of open access that have a direct effect on CSIC, such as
that of the Government of the Community of Madrid.
Thus, MELIBEA should not be considered a CSIC institutional project.
Best wishes,
Agnès Ponsati, Director of CSIC Libraries Coordination Unit
Ramón Rodríguez, Coordinator of Revistas-CSIC
-----Mensaje original-----
De: boai-forum-bounces AT ecs.soton.ac.uk
[mailto:boai-forum-bounces AT ecs.soton.ac.uk] En nombre de Stevan Harnad
Enviado el: lunes, 19 de julio de 2010 15:56
Para: boai-forum AT ecs.soton.ac.uk
CC: SPARC Open Access Forum; JISC-REPOSITORIES AT JISCMAIL.AC.UK;
AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM AT LISTSERVER.SIGMAXI.ORG
Asunto: [BOAI] Re: OA policies and their "weight"
Dear Reme, if I may also make an intervention in your exchange with Steve
Hitchcock about the MELIBEA OA policy evaluator:
http://www.accesoabierto.net/politicas/
The MELIBEA service is extremely timely and promising, and could be
potentially useful and even influential in shaping OA mandates -- but that
makes it all the more important to get it right, rather than releasing
MELIBEA prematurely, when it still risks increasing confusion rather than
providing clarity and direction.
You are right to point out that -- unlike the CSIC's University Ranking and
the Repository Ranking -- the policy evaluator is not really a ranking. But
you have set up the composite algorithm and the graphics to make it a
ranking just the same.
You are also point out, correctly, that the policy criteria for institutions
and funders are not (and should not be) the same. Yet, with the MELIBEA
coding as well as the algorithm, they are treated the same way.
You also point out, rightly, that gold OA publishing policy is not central
to institutional OA policy making, yet there it is, as part of the MELIBEA
algorithm.
You also point out that the color code has nothing to do with the ↵
"green" OA
coding -- yet there it is, competing with the widespread use of green to
designate self-archiving, and thereby causing confusion, both overt and
covert.
I would be more than happy to give you feedback on every aspect of MELIBEA
-- it could be a useful and natural complement to the ROARMAP registry of OA
policies.
But as it is designed now, I can only agree with Steve Hitchcock's points
and conclude that consulting MELIBEA today would be likely to induce
confusion and would not help in bringing the all-important focus and
direction to OA policy-making that I am sure CSIC, too, seeks, and seeks to
help bring about.
Here are just a few prima facie points:
(1) Since MELIBEA is not, and should not be construed as a ranking of OA
policies -- especially because it includes both institutional and funder
policies -- it is important NOT to plug it into an algorithm until and
unless the algorithm has first been carefully tested, with consultation, to
make sure it weights policy criteria in a way that optimizes OA progress and
guides policy-makers in the right direction.
(2) For this reason, it is more important to allow users to generate
separate flat lists of institutions or funders on the various policy
criteria, considered and compared independently, rather than on the basis of
a prematurely and arbitrarily weighted joint algorithm.
(3) This is all the more important since the data are based on less then 200
institutions, whereas the CSIC University Rankings are based on thousands.
Since the population is still so small, MELIBEA risks having a
disproportionate effect on initial conditions and hence direction-setting;
all the more reason NOT to amplify noise and indirection by assigning
untested initial weights without carefully thinking through and weighing the
consequences.
(4) A potential internal cross-validator of some of the criteria would be a
reliable measure of outcome -- but that requires much more attention to
estimating the annual size and growth-rate of each repository (in terms of
OA's target contents, which are full-text articles), normalized for
institution size and annual total target output. Policy criteria (such as
request/require or immediate/delayed) should be cross-validated against
these outcome measures (such as percentage and growth rate of annual target
output).
(5) The MELIBEA color coding needs to be revised, and revised quickly, if
there is to be an algorithm at all. All those arbitrary colors in the
display of single repositories as ranked by the algorithm are both
unnecessary and confusing. The objective should be to order and focus
clearly and intuitively. Whatever is correlated with more green OA output
(such as a higher level or faster growth rate in OA's target content) should
be coded as darker or bigger shades of green. The same should be true for
the policy criteria, separately and jointly: in each case, request/require,
delayed/immediate, etc., the greenward polarity is obvious and intuitive.
This should be reflected in the graphics as well as in any comparative
rankings.
(6) If you include repositories with no OA policy at all (i.e., just a
repository and an open invitation to deposit) then all you are doing is
duplicating ROAR and ROARMAP, whereas the purpose, presumably, of MELIBEA,
is to highlight, weigh and compare specific policy differences among (the
very few) repositories that DO have policies.
(7) The sign-up data --
http://www.accesoabierto.net/politicas/nueva.php?directorio=politicas -- are
also rather confusing; the criteria are not always consistent, relevant or
applicable. The sign-up seems to be designed to make a funder mandate the
generic option, whereas this is quite the opposite of reality. There are far
more institutions and institutional repositories and policies than funders.
There should be separate criterial lists for institutional policies and for
funder policies; they are not the same. There is also far too much focus on
gold OA policy and payment. If included at all, this should only be at the
end, as an addendum, not the focus at the beginning, and on a par with green
OA policy.
(8) There is also potential confusion on the matter of "waivers": ↵
There are
two aspects of a mandate. One concerns whether or not deposit is required
(and if so, whether that requirement can be waived) and the other concerns
whether or not rights-reservation is required (and if so, whether that
requirement can be waived). These two distinct and independent
requirements/waivers are completely conflated in the current version of
MELIBEA.
I hope there will be substantive consultation and conscientious redesign of
these and other aspects of MELIBEA before it is can recommended for serious
consideration and use.
Stevan Harnad
On 2010-07-19, at 5:18 AM, Remedios Melero wrote:
> Dear Steve,
>
> I apologize for the delay in my response, but I will try to give some
explanations to make clear some issues you raised in your message (my
comments are in capital letters, to distinguish them from yours)
>
>
>
> El 15/07/2010 11:22, Steve Hitchcock escribió:
>> Reme, Thank you for bringing this new service to our attention. OA
policies are vitally important to the development of institutional
repositories, and services that can highlight and bring attention to this
development can be valuable.
>>
>> There are a few aspects of the validation aspects of the new MELIBEA
service that confuse, and possibly trouble, me. The first is the main
indicator, %OAval, which is the most visible result for a policy. What do
you expect this will tell people about a given policy? I randomly selected a
couple of policies, one of which was for my own school, to find they each
scored about 50%. I would expect these to be among the leaders in terms of
OA policies, so this seems a surprisingly unhelpful score.
>>
>> So what's the explanation? Note that the objects being evaluated are
institutional OA policies; they are effectively being presented in relation
to institutional repositories when the policy specifies where to archive is
an IR with a URL. It seems that the scores include ratings for OA
publication policy, libre vs gratis OA, publisher pdf, sanctions (score if
Yes), incentives (score if Yes), etc., some of which an institution might
specify but which might not apply to an IR
>> http://www.accesoabierto.net/politicas/politicas_estructura.php
>> . However you weight these factors they are still contributors to the
overall score, so a policy that is specific to an IR is immediately
handicapped, or appears to be unless there is more context to understand the
scores.
>>
>>
>>
> AS I WROTE BEFORE THIS IS NOT A RANKING, IT IS NOT THE AIM OF MELIBEA BUT
TO HAVE A KIND OF REFERENCE ON WHAT TOPICS, ISSUES OR MATTERS TO BE INCLUDED
IN AN OA POLICY. WE ARE TALKING ABOUT INSTITUTIONAL POLICIES OF DIFFERENTE
NATURE, NOT ABOUT REPOSITORIES POLICIES. IF THE POLICY ONLY TALKS ABOUT THE
REQUIREMENT TO DEPOSIT IN A REPOSITORY, IT SHOULD SPECIFY WHAT, WHEN AND
UNDER WHAT CONDITIONS, IF ANY. IT IS NOT THE SAME TO SAY WHAT DOCUMENTS AND
WHAT VERSIONS AND WHEN THAN SIMPLY SAY " ANY" OR "AS SOON AS ↵
POSSIBLE" (this
could be a month after publication or years after publication, depending on
one's criteria). GOLD ROUTE, NEVER IS REQUIRED ACCORDING OUR APPROACH ↵
("Gold
(Recommended in OA journals") AND NOT ALL OA JOURNALS ARE SUPPORTED BY ↵
SAME
ECONOMIC MODEL.
>
>
>> Which leads me to another question on the visualisation of the ↵
validator,
and its use of green, gold (and red) in the meter. Do the green and gold
refer the the classic OA colours? This would be quite convenient, since it
would appear that the green repository policies I mentioned above are
achieving almost full scores in the green zone of the meter. However, I
suspect this cannot be the case, because it would assume that institutions
must have a green AND gold policy, but not simply gold (whatever argument
could be put for that).
>>
>>
> COLORS DO NOT MEAN THAT, WE WANTED JUST TO DISTINGUISH ZONES LIKE IT WERE
A SPECTRA.
>
>> It is important that new services should help reveal and promote OA
policies, as you seek to do, but at the same time not to prejudice the
development of such policies by mixing and not fairly separating the
contributing factors, especially where these relate to different types of
OA.
>>
>>
> I DO NOT THINK WE ARE MIXING, IN FACT THERE TWO MODELS, ONE FOR UNIV. AND
RESEARCH CNETRES AND ANOTHER FOR FUNDERS AND GOV. INSTITUTIONS AND THE
QUESTIONS FOR THEM ARE DIFFERENT, for instance, FOR A FUNDER THE QUESTION
ABOUT DEPOSIT O THESIS IS NOT APPLICABLE.
> IN SUMMARY, OUR MODEL COULD NOT BE "PERFECT" BUT I IS ONE, WHICH ↵
COULD
DETECT DIFFERENCES BETWEEN REQUEST AND REQUIRE, WHO, WHAT , WHEN IF THERE
ARE ANY INCENTIVES OR SANCTIONS ( this has not to be a negative point but
to remember we should assume reponsible attitudes).
>
> However we will revise the model to see if we can make any improvement to
make it clear, we are working also in a graph interface to show some data in
graphical form.
> Best wishes
> Reme
>
>>
>>> R. Melero
>>> IATA, CSIC
>>> Avda Agustín Escardino 7, 46980 Paterna (Valencia), Spain
>>> TEl +34 96 390 00 22. Fax 96 363 63 01
>>> E-mail
>>> rmelero AT iata.csic.es
>>>
>>>
>>> http://www.accesoabierto.net
>>>
>>>
>>> --
>>>
>>>
>
>
> --
> To unsubscribe from the BOAI Forum, use the form on this page:
> http://www.soros.org/openaccess/forum.shtml?f
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